2024 was dubbed "The Year of Elections," as approximately 3.7 billion people in 72 countries around the world had the opportunity to vote, the largest election year in human history. Halfway through 2025, Larry Diamond joins Michael McFaul to discuss how the results of those elections are playing out, evolving trends in democratic progress and regression, and how the United States fits into this global picture.

Larry Diamond is the the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), the the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.

Watch the video version of their conversation above, or listen to the audio below, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other major podcast platforms. 

TRANSCRIPT:

McFaul: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Michael McFaul, the director of FSI. Today's conversation is with Larry Diamond.

He's the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, among his many other titles and accolades, which we don't have time to review all of them.

His research focuses on trends affecting freedom and democracy, both here in the United States and around the world. I consider Larry to be the world's foremost expert on democracy. And we are delighted that he had some time to join us today to talk about first American democracy and maybe the world.

Larry, thanks for joining us.

Diamond: Thank you, Mike. It's great to be with you.

McFaul: So let's start with America, even though I know you've been away for a while. We just celebrated the 4th of July here, a celebration of America's democracy. How are we doing, Larry?

Diamond: Well, after 249 years, democracy in the United States is still standing, But it's embattled in a way that I think it has almost never been, except in a period of total war.

McFaul: Right.

Diamond: And total war, I mean like World War I, World War II, or the Civil War

To have an assault on the Constitution and the rule of law without even the faint claim of objective national emergency — not that some of what Trump is doing would even be justified in wartime — is especially disturbing.

I think we need to separate, Mike, the things that Trump is doing that a lot of people — particularly in the Democratic Party or independents or on the left — might not like substantively, but that are not intrinsically undemocratic; they're just policy differences.

We need to separate that from the abuses of presidential power and the rule of law that have, I think, very deep and troubling implications for the quality and stability of American democracy. So it's a concerning time.

McFaul: So that's a great point. Help us disarticulate, untangle those two different sets of policies versus actual threats.

Diamond: Well, I don't like this ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ that just passed. I don't like its, I think, extreme regressive implications for the distribution of income because of the weighting of the tax cuts to the already extremely wealthy. I don't like what it does to our fiscal integrity and stability by adding trillions of dollars of debt. And I don't like what it will do to probably throw millions of people off of Medicaid.

And that's just the beginning: the savaging of renewable energy investments, the extremely regressive nature of our approach and denialist nature of our approach to climate change and our effort to adapt in a way to slow its progress and its effects by decarbonizing our energy systems. The refusal to recognize the direct relationship between the ecological and human disaster that's been unfolding on Texas with dozens of deaths due to extreme rain and flooding and our pouring of carbon into the atmosphere in a way that's destabilizing it.

All of this is terrible policy, but it's not undemocratic. The bill passed by a single vote in the Senate and a narrow margin in the House, and Trump signed it.

It's disturbing, it's irregular, it was extremely bad procedure because of the lack of hearings, but it's not a violation of democracy in the way that other things that Trump is doing to misuse emergency powers, to weaponize the National Guard in California; to intimidate and bear down on largely peaceful protests; to go after critics of the administration; and to pressure and intimidate independent actors in law firms, in universities, and in the mass media to do his bidding  — or in the case of CBS and other actors — to essentially pay him bribes in order to avoid a court case or displeasing the president of the United States.

What we're seeing is certainly an autocratic style of governance with the implication that we could see even more abuse of power coming in the future.

So, I think we're seeing something that's in process and that has multiple dimensions that people confuse in a way that is not helpful to the preservation of democracy.

McFaul: Right. And my guess on the latter is you've seen these kinds of things in other countries where there's been an erosion of democracy, right?

Diamond: Yeah, of course.

McFaul: So there, I mean, nobody knows the parallel comparative world better than you. Are you surprised, Larry, by the fact we're now talking about American democracy in the way that we used to talk about other countries?

And second, as you think about that, help us understand how we got here. Why is this happening now?

Diamond: Well, first of all, on the surprise level, no, I'm not surprised at all. I think he and the intellectual architects of this effort to aggrandize presidential power through the theory of the unitary executive, which was celebrated and advocated very passionately in the Heritage Foundation book, Project 2025.

This kind of approach to governing, to overriding checks and balances and creating an imperial presidency was very clearly signaled in the run-up to the 2024 election and in the writing that people who are now key actors in this administration were doing.

And Trump himself has long signaled a contempt for independent media, a contempt for opposition, a contempt for congressional restraints, a contempt for due process and the rule of law.

Then once we had the kinds of appointments we had of patently unqualified but servilely loyal partisans of Trump to highly sensitive positions such as Kash Patel at the FBI; Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence; Robert F. Kennedy in this atrocious appointment to head Health and Human Services, which is already having profound public health consequences. And the others: Hegseth at Defense and so on, and others that you're aware of.

Once these appointments started being made and once they triumphed on narrow votes in the Senate with numerous people, including Senator Thom Tillis, who's now announced he's not going to run for reelection because he just can't take it anymore.

McFaul: Can’t take it anymore, yeah.

Diamond:  But until then, he caved as well on these appointments. Probably at least a dozen Republican senators would have voted against these kinds of appointments if they could have voted by secret ballot, maybe more.

McFaul: Interesting.

Diamond: But because of the intimidation factor and the knowledge that what's happened to Tillis would happen to them if they tried to defy the president, we've got this march toward incompetent but slavishly loyal service to an authoritarian personality in the White House.

And what we're seeing here, what I wrote about in my book, Ill Winds, in 2019, is the autocrat’s 12 step program, the authoritarian playbook: first you demonize the opposition as not just ‘different’ and ‘wrong’ on policies, a very legitimate line of debate in a democracy, but as ‘disloyal’ and as an ‘enemy,’ or even using kind of Nazi-like language, that they're ‘vermin’ that need to be removed from the political landscape.

And then you go after the media as ‘fake news’ and disloyal and start punishing media who are critical of you and using the courts and civil lawsuits to bring them to heel.

You know, many of these media outlets—this is the problem with CBS now—owned by Paramount, owned by Sherry Redstone who wants to do a new merger deal or sales deal that would be personally very lucrative for her. So she didn't want to be in conflict with the president. So she kind of ordered CBS to basically agree to this ludicrous $16 million payment in a case involving 60 minutes where everybody knows, every legal expert who's commented on it, that Trump would have lost in court if CBS had pursued it.

McFaul: Had fought it, yeah.

Diamond: So you go from that to the judiciary, and we've seen a pretty politically—tragically, in my view—loyal Supreme Court steadily expand the boundaries of presidential prerogative and power.

And you go to other dimensions of potential horizontal accountability being vitiated: the regulatory agencies, the civil service, the security apparatus, and so on, and all of them being reduced to personal and servile loyalty to a single individual.

And ultimately, you weaponize the instruments of state power as has been done in Hungary, done in Turkey, done in India, done in Mexico to punish individuals or threaten individuals who speak out too forcefully.

You saw what happened to a United States Senator, Alex Padilla, being manhandled for speaking up in a press conference. You see what's happening to two former officials of the first Trump administration, including the Miles Taylor, author of the book, you know, about Trump's first abuse of power and his first administration.

It's all just, you know, part of the playbook of an incremental slide backwards from liberal democracy toward a kind of hybrid autocracy.

McFaul: That sounds depressing. I remember the 12 step program in your book. Do you see any signs of democratic renewal, resistance out there, or is it too early to tellt?

Diamond: Well, on the one hand, the picture I've just painted, Mike, may seem a bit bleak. But in fact, I think that there are a lot of elements of resilience and hope for, let's say, the correction or reassertion of constraints.

The two that I think have been ambiguous, if not disappointing so far, have been the judiciary and the media. The media has not been doing the level of investigation that I think is warranted now, although I do praise the New York Times for leading in this regard in terms of reporting on the obvious and grotesque level of corruption and conflict of interest in this administration involving cryptocurrency and almost direct payments to the president of the United States and so many other things that we could talk about.

The judiciary was looking more hopeful, but I think the recent Supreme Court decisions toward the end of this Supreme Court term, particularly eliminating the possibility of nationwide

federal court injunctions to stop some of these authoritarian actions has now created an open door for Trump to abuse presidential power and the rights of individuals and groups under the Constitution in a way that will be much slower and more difficult to stop.

But we still have a vibrant civil society. We'll see what happens in terms of the behavior of NGOs, universities. Other law firms are pushing back.

McFaul: Right

Diamond: And the law firms that did kowtow to Trump and sign these deals—they've been losing a lot of clients from people who are angry about this capitulation.

McFaul: Yeah, that’s interesting.

Diamond: And most of all, Mike, we still have an electoral democracy. And there will be midterm elections in November of next year. I think the right way to confront a bill like this massive omnibus regressive taxation bill that's just passed and been signed into law is not to complain about it being undemocratic—in the literal sense, it was not—but to complain about it being a policy disaster that should be punished and corrected at the polls.

And once I think its effects take effect, despite the cynical effort to time a lot of the cash payments and inducements to happen immediately to give Trump electoral advantage, whereas the pain is more deferred, I still think a lot of people are going to see through that and punish what Trump and the Republicans have done in this regard.

So if we have free and fair elections next year—and I worry about the assault on the legal infrastructure of that as well—but if we have free and fair elections, I think there will be the beginning of a very substantial correction.

And if you look at how creeping authoritarianism has been reversed in places like Poland and Brazil and Sri Lanka and Senegal, places as diverse as those four countries. The decisive shift back away from democratic backsliding toward the reinvigoration of democracy has always happened by the voters at the polls.

McFaul: Interesting. Those are countries we should all probably study a little more closely to learn lessons from how they did that there.

Larry, we're running out of time already; I think I want to bring you back to talk about global democracy, a full depth on it, but just give us a little taste. You just got back from Taiwan. You were in South Korea right before then. Tell us a little bit about what's happening with democracy in those two places and are we witnessing a global trend of which the United States is a part of a democratic recession—you've written a lot about this—or is that too superficial? Is that too simplistic?

Diamond: Well, there clearly, Mike, has been a persistent and gathering trend, I think, for roughly 18 years of democratic recession, of democratic progress in net terms in the world, peaking and now receding, and of the quality of democracy in many democracies, sliding backwards.

Two big trends that I think we should worry about and see in the United States: One is severe political polarization—party lines coinciding with other social cleavages. And those cleavages vary from one country to another, but often they're like what they are in the U.S. and certainly they are in Europe.

And it's the countryside and more traditional communities against urban cosmopolitan elites. That's a major cleavage in a lot of places.

McFaul: Around the world, right.

Diamond: And secondly, what we see is executive concentration and often abuse of power mobilizing the intense constituencies of devotion and threat that are generated by this political polarization.

But every country has its own story. The Korean story is very interesting because the polarization got so bad in terms of the deadlock between a parliament—a unicameral parliament, the National Assembly—that had come to be controlled by the left-of-center and a presidency that was still occupied by the right-of-center that the president, in frustration, tried to declare martial law and locked down the congress.

And this is really kind of an amazing and inspiring story of a country rising up, a civil society rising up, a parliament rising up and saying no, and then managing to overcome the incipient military cooperation, convene and move to reassert its authority and impeach the president, who was then removed.

And of course, the difference between Korea and the United States is the final decision on removal of the president after impeachment is not made by a partisan upper chamber of the congress as in the U.S., but by the Constitutional Court.

McFaul: Right.

Diamond: And the Constitutional Court ultimately decided pretty decisively to remove President Yun, and then they just had a new presidential election.

So in Korea, we can see evidence of a kind of re-equilibration or restoration of democratic integrity, but still with intense political polarization that I hope the new president will try to address and relieve.

In Taiwan, it's a very different story in one sense and a very familiar one in the other. The familiar one is what we had in Korea, and we'll probably see after the next midterm elections in the United States: the presidency controlled by one party and the parliament controlled by another. And that battle is still ongoing.

The president's party, the Democratic Progressive Party, has managed to get recall petitions approved and validated to try to recall more than a third of all the opposition members of parliament, which constitute a majority of parliament, so that the ruling party, the DPP and the presidency, can regain control of the parliament.

It's a dubious strategy. Not unconstitutional, but questionable in terms of democratic tolerance and democratic spirit. It's really embittered the country and the president is having trouble getting his budget through.

What we see there is what we see in a lot of places: democratic vigor coinciding with democratic polarization and difficulty in governing. This is the more universal challenge now.

McFaul: Well, Larry, so many more countries I want to ask about, but I'm going to ask you to come back and join World Class one more time over the summer.

Diamond: Okay, anytime.

McFaul: We are really fortunate at Stanford that we have a senior fellowship in global democracy, and we are especially fortunate that it is occupied by Larry Diamond. Always great to talk to you about these things, Larry. We'll have you on again soon.

Diamond: Thank you so much, Mike.

McFaul: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what's happening in the world and why.